David-Neel, Alexandra (1868–1969)

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David-Neel, Alexandra (1868–1969)

French explorer and expert on Tibetan Buddhism who became the first Western woman to visit the forbidden city of Lhasa. Name variations: Alexandra Neel; attempted career as opera singer under name Alexandra Myriel. Born in Saint-Mandé, France, on October 24, 1868; died in Paris in 1969, a celebrity at the age of 100; daughter of a radical journalist living in exile in Belgium; married distant cousin, Philippe Neel (split up within days, though corresponding regularly until his death in 1941); children: (adopted) Yongden, a Sikkimese monk and companion on her journeys.

Lived an unhappy childhood, both at convent school and with her family; briefly attempted career as an opera singer, before taking up journalism and studying Eastern religions; set sail for India (August 3, 1911) to embark on a series of Asiatic journeys, culminating with her visit to Lhasa in disguise (1923); returned to France as a hero (1925); immersed in writing about her journeys and studying Buddhism until her death (1969).

Selected writings:

My Journey to Lhasa (1927); With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet (1931); Tibetan Journey (1936).

One night in Tibet, on a particularly high pass, 100 miles north of Lhasa, Alexandra David-Neel and her adopted son Yongden found themselves in danger of freezing. They desperately needed to warm themselves if they were to survive until morning. Unfortunately, the flint and steel they carried to light a fire had become wet and would not ignite. In desperation, David-Neel resolved to dry the tools by means of thumo reskiang—the Tibetan art of increasing internal body heat. She had been initiated into this practice some years before while living as a hermit. She had seen, she wrote: "Hermits seated night after night, motionless on the snow, entirely naked, sunk in meditation, while the terrible blizzard whirled and hissed around them." She had witnessed: "The test given to their disciples who, on the shore of a lake or river in the heart of winter, dried on their bodies, as on a stove, a number of sheets dipped in the icy water."

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I craved to go beyond the garden gate, to follow the road that passed it by.
—Alexandra David-Neel

Sending Yongden off to gather fuel to keep warm by exercise, David-Neel placed the flint and steel under her clothes and began to concentrate intensely on the ritualistic practice. Soon, in her mind's eye, she saw flames rising around her. "They grew higher and higher," she wrote; "they enveloped me, curling their tongues about my head. I felt deliciously comfortable." Coming out of her trance, she found a bitter wind still blowing, but her body was glowing, and the flint and steel were dry. By the time the astonished Yongden returned, she had made a fire and was boiling tea.

As a child in France, Alexandra David-Neel was strong-willed but unhappy. Her parents were ill-matched and difficult, and she loathed her convent schooling. Indeed, she ran away more than once, on one occasion getting as far as England. After an unsuccessful attempt to become an opera singer, Alexandra began to attend lectures on Buddhism and other Eastern religions at the Theosophical Society in Paris. She also studied journalism and the Tibetan language, for she was by now determined to travel and write about the East.

It was at this time that she made a rather curious marriage with Philippe Neel, a distant cousin. Given Alexandra's independence and lust for travel, it seems odd that she should ever have thought of marriage as a viable proposition. Indeed, it was not. Within a couple of days, the couple had split up. Nevertheless, they would correspond and respect each other for the rest of their lives. Stranger still, Philippe would provide the money without which David-Neel's years of travel would not have been possible. He also became her literary agent.

David-Neel set sail for India on October 3, 1911, and was not to return to Europe for 14 years. She managed to obtain an interview with the Dalai Lama, then in exile in Darjeeling—the first Western woman to be so privileged. The experience increased her eagerness to learn more about Tibetan Buddhism and the customs of the inhabitants of this remote land.

The situation in Tibet at the end of the 19th century was one to whet the appetite of explorers, mystics, surveyors, and botanists alike—for the country had been sealed off from Western foreigners for almost 100 years. Before the borders were closed, anyone could make the journey if they were brave enough to face the icy passes and the murderous brigands who infested the border areas. Few did, except a handful of Jesuit priests and Franciscan missionaries.

However, by the early 19th century, the steadily expanding empires of Britain and Russia, on her south and northern borders, convinced the Tibetan authorities of the need to close the kingdom to protect the country's religious and political integrity. The result was that during the last two decades of the century, an assortment of intrepid travelers were attempting to penetrate the forbidden land, about which almost nothing was known. Above all, there was a race of sorts to reach that most forbidden place of all—the holy city of Lhasa, spiritual home of the highest lama in Tibet—the Dalai Lama. Three of these were women—Annie Royle Taylor (1891), Mrs. St. George Littledale (1895), and Susie Rijnhart (1898)—and all were detected by the Tibetans and turned back after epic and dangerous journeys. Two of the women—Taylor and Rijnhart—were missionaries, naive enough to think they could convert the Dalai Lama to Christianity. In her effort, Susie Rijnhart lost both a husband and a baby.

By 1904, the race was over. Fearing Russian influence in Lhasa (which would prove nonexistent), the Indian viceroy, Lord Curzon, sent Colonel Sir Francis Younghusband across the Himalayan passes at the head of a small army. By the beginning of August, the "most mysterious city on earth" was entered by Western soldiers and journalists. The foreign correspondents relayed the secrets of Lhasa to an eager world.

Although deeply humiliated by the invasion, Tibetan enmity toward the British did not last long, since the British had no intention of staying. Having discovered no Russians and having established the right to set up a small trading mission in the town of Gyantse, the British expedition left for India. In fact, Tibet's danger came from a different quarter. In 1910, the Chinese invaded Tibet and occupied Lhasa amid much slaughter, and the Dalai Lama fled to exile in India. Here his ties with Britain were strengthened, and he became a lifelong friend of the British administrator Sir Charles Bell. After the Chinese were ousted from Tibet in 1913, Bell was invited to Lhasa as the Dalai Lama's personal guest and stayed for over a year. Some of the mysteries of the strange land had been dispelled.

This in no way diminishes Alexandra David-Neel's achievements. Trespassers in Tibet were still not welcome, particularly women, and Lhasa was strictly out of bounds except by direct invitation of the Dalai Lama. The British, determined to maintain their warmer relations with the Tibetan administration, were also keen to enforce this ban.

Alexandra David-Neel began her Tibetan adventures in 1914, when she illegally crossed the border and a spent a winter studying at a monastery a few miles from the frontier. A year later, after living for some months as a hermit in a cave in Sikkim in northern India, she again crossed into Tibet, journeying as far as Shigatse and the great monastery of Tashilumpo. This was the home of the Panchen Lama—the second highest lama in Tibet. "I was most cordially welcomed," she wrote later. "The high lama wished me to stay with him for a long time, if not forever. He offered me free access to all libraries and lodgings in the town." David-Neel knew, however, that she was in no position to enjoy his largesse. Indeed, on returning to Sikkim, she found that the British had learned of her illicit travels and had ordered her to leave northern India.

Years later, she was to write angrily of the British: "What right had they to erect barriers around a country which was not even legally theirs." She felt she was being prevented from pursuing her quite legitimate interest in Tibetan culture, literature, and religion. This differentiated her from many of the early participants in the race for Lhasa. "Strange as the fact may appear," she wrote, "I must confess that, unlike most travellers who have attempted to reach Lhasa, and have failed to reach their goal, I never entertained a strong desire to visit the sacred lamaist city.… [A]nd as for researches re garding the literature, philosophy, and secret lore of Tibet, these things could be pursued more profitably amongst the literati and mystics in the freely accessible and more intellectual parts of north-eastern Tibet, than in the capital." So David-Neel set out for northeastern Tibet.

Journeying eastward through Burma, Japan, and Korea, staying in Buddhist monasteries and constantly studying the ways of the East, David-Neel eventually reached Peking in October 1917. She had now been joined by a young Sikkimese lama named Yongden, who would eventually become her adopted son.

The two travelers set out to cross 2,000 miles of a China racked by civil war and banditry, to the great Tibetan monastery of Kumbum on Tibet's northeastern border. Here they remained for almost three years, steeping themselves in the life of the monastery, translating sacred texts, while all the time David-Neel was perfecting her almost faultless Tibetan. They also made several excursions into the Tibetan borderland. It was on one of these, when David-Neel was again made to leave at the behest of the local British consul, that she finally resolved to travel to Lhasa. "Before the frontier post to which I had been escorted," she wrote, "I took an oath that in spite of all obstacles I would reach Lhasa and show what the will of a woman could achieve!"

David-Neel's plan was that she and Yongden travel disguised as beggar pilgrims on their way to visit the holy city. The fact that Yongden was a well-read lama would add color to their story, for thousands of such mendicant monks and their families ramble across Tibet throughout the year, going from one sacred place to another. As David-Neel wrote: "A lama capable of reading the Scriptures, who can perform the different lamaist ceremonies, and can, above all, act as exorcist and fortune-teller, may at any time find himself so well provided with food, clothing, and even money, that he may dispense with begging for several months." David-Neel would pose as Yongden's aged and beggarly mother, but she carried a small bag of gold and a revolver for emergencies. In addition to wearing ragged clothes, David-Neel dyed her hair with Chinese ink and darkened her face. They would thus dispense with the need for immense caravans of pack animals that would give them away.

So at last, in the winter of 1923, now aged 55, Alexandra David-Neel set out on her greatest adventure of all. For the next four months, she and her companion struggled towards Lhasa through atrocious weather and across some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth. Sometimes to avoid settlements and government posts, they slept out in the forest, using a small tent they concealed in their baggage. At other times, they shared the primitive hospitality of Tibetan hovels. Their staple diet was tsampa—a mixture of barley and butter tea.

But David-Neel was in no way deterred. Indeed, she revelled in her surroundings. As she wrote in My Journey to Lhasa:

I should have to eat in the way of the poor, dipping my unwashed fingers in the soup and in the tea, to knead the tsampa, and to do any number of things which disgusted me. Yet I knew that such a penance would not be without reward, and that under cover of my inconspicuous garb of a poor pilgrim I should gather a quantity of observations which would never have come within the reach of a foreigner, or even perhaps, of a Tibetan of the upper classes. I was to live near the very soul and heart of the masses of that unknown land, near those of its womenfolk whom no outsider had ever approached. To the knowledge I had already acquired about the religious people of the country I would add another and quite intimate one, concerning its humblest sons and daughters.

In her account of her epic journey, David-Neel shows perception and great good humor. She avoids over-romanticizing the ordinary Tibetan. She also shows a sense of mischief—almost of glee—in the way that she and Yongden were able to hoodwink self-important officials, for the dangers of detection, by other pilgrims as well as officials, were very real. Had she been found out, she would have been ignominiously returned to the border, and Yongden would have been severely punished, perhaps even executed.

One evening as they approached Lhasa, a strange lama seemed "to spring out of the ground" in front of them and sat down uninvited at their campfire. After remaining silent for a while, during which darkness fell, he slowly drew out a bowl made from a skull and asked for tea. Then staring fixedly at David-Neel, he asked why she was no longer wearing the costume she had customarily worn in Eastern Tibet. "My heart stopped beating," she wrote later. "This man knew me! But from where I did not know." Seeing her apprehension, the strange lama added even more mysteriously: "Do not try to remember me. I have as many faces as I desire, and you have never seen this one." They then conversed far into the night on Tibetan philosophy and mysticism, and David-Neel knew intuitively that this uninvited guest would not betray her. "Finally," she wrote, "he arose, and staff in hand, vanished like a phantom, as he had come. His footsteps made no sound on the stony path. He entered the jungle, and seemed to melt away in it."

The last stage of Alexandra David-Neel's journey to Lhasa was now at hand. Fortuitously, the companions had arrived just as the great New Year Festivals were beginning, and the road to the city was thronged with pilgrims just like themselves. Added to this, a huge dust storm blew up as they were entering the gates, hiding everyone. Slipping into the city was easy. "For two months," David-Neel recounts, "I was to wander freely in the lamaist Rome, with none to suspect that, for the first time in history, a foreign woman was beholding the Forbidden City." The two travelers found accommodation in a "ramshackle cottage occupied by beggarly people," where the idea of looking for a foreign woman would have occurred to no one.

Now David-Neel was free to reap the rewards of her hardships on the road. She could wander the busy streets, enjoying the bazaars, tea shops and temples, and gossip with other pilgrims, who never suspected her identity. She could observe the shoddy foreign goods on sale and be amused by the bands playing English tunes or the khaki-clad soldiers (some of them carried European rifles that were specially doctored by British holy men, she was told, so as not to harm Westerners).

She was also able to visit the Potala Palace, the massive building—part palace, part temple, part fortress—which towers over the city and was only open to pilgrims during the New Year Festivals. There she saw the "sumptuous suites of apartments" of the Dalai Lamas surrounded by temples, tombs, and shrines, and all lit up by thousands of yak-butter candles (indeed the whole of Lhasa smelt of yak butter). There were also fearsome shrines to evil demons and deities that pre-dated the arrival of Buddhism in Tibet that needed constant tending, she was told, if their escape was to be prevented. David-Neel saw the Dalai Lama officiate at the Butter Festival, where he inspected the great statues carved from butter. She also visited the three great monasteries of Lhasa—Sera, Draping, and Garden—each housing over 500 monks, and paid her respects at the Jokhang, the holiest temple in Tibet.

After living undetected in Lhasa for two months, Alexandra and Yongden were forced to leave in a hurry. They had witnessed a drunken domestic quarrel in the hovel where they lived and were being called to give evidence before the magistrate. David-Neel did not believe that even her perfect Tibetan disguise could stand up to that sort of scrutiny. Reluctantly, they set out on the road south to British India. David-Neel later recalled looking back on Lhasa for the last time from some miles away: "From that distance the Potala alone could be seen … a tiny castle suspended, it seemed, in the air like a mirage."

On her return to France in 1925, David-Neel found she was famous. She was showered with honors, being awarded the coveted Gold Medal of the Geographical Society of France and made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. She was also awarded a silver medal by the Royal Geographical Society of Belgium. Britain gave her nothing, perhaps because they were piqued at how successfully she had hoodwinked their authorities, or more likely because her travels had not actually contributed to the scientific exploration of Tibet. Tibetan experts such as Younghusband and David Macdonald, a dumb-founded British trade agent who had met her in Gyantse after she left Lhasa, were generous in their praise of her extraordinary fortitude and courage. David-Neel did have some detractors, however. A disparaging book was published in France in 1972—three years after her death—claiming that she neither went to Lhasa nor spoke Tibetan. Such allegations are easily dismissed. Indeed, David Macdonald, the first British official to see her after she left Lhasa, had no hesitation in confirming in writing where she had come from, and that she spoke fluent Tibetan—as he did himself.

David-Neel's great travels were over, but her interest in Tibetan Buddhism was lifelong. She wrote many esoteric tracts on the subject, as well as highly popular books such as With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet (in which her claim that she actually once witnessed a monk flying stretches credibility). Her great hardships do not appear to have affected her health in any way. Indeed, she was to survive her adopted son Yongden by 14 years. Alexandra David-Neel died in 1969, at age 100.